Gemini by Sonya Mukherjee

I read this book a few weeks ago and it blew me away. I always read a lot of Young Adult books because, hello – YA! It’s young, it’s fun, it’s emotional, it’s just great. I find myself preferring to read adult suspense, memoirs, or YA. That’s pretty much it. But that means I sometimes get in a rut… Some YA books have very similar plots, or characters, or you just don’t connect with it in some way, and you burn out.

Sometimes.

But not this time.

This book was so unique and so beautiful and so breathtaking. It was excruciating to put it down to tend to my child. I wanted to burrow down into this book’s world and stay there, and I still feel that way.

Hailey and Clara are conjoined twins. They are seventeen, about to graduate high school, and dreaming about the future. Their mother wants them to live at home and go to the nearby college, but Hailey wants to go to art school. Clara doesn’t mind staying close to home, because her head is always in the stars. If she could go anywhere, it would be into space to look down at the Earth and really put everything in perspective.

When a new guy moves to the twins’ small town, everyone at the high school is intrigued. They are a close-knit community, and everyone knows everyone. Everyone is used to Hailey and Clara, so someone new to adjust to makes Clara nervous. Hailey is excited, because she loves to stand out with her pink hair and in-your-face attitude. Max, the new guy, loves astronomy, and Clara starts to crush on him. She and Hailey have never dated, never thought boys would be interested in them. But the Sadie Hawkins dance is on the horizon, and Hailey wants to go.

I loved that this book deals with “typical” teenager topics like crushes and dating, but it had a fascinating skew with the conjoined twins angle. I read an adult novel about conjoined twins years ago, and it was awful, so I love that this book is interesting and exciting and will grab readers and make them think about people who are different.

Fun Home

Fun Home: a Family Tragicomic by Alison Bechdel

This is a graphic novel about a girl who finds out her father is gay only after she comes out as a lesbian. He dies shortly after, and she remembers her strange relationship with him, as well as her childhood growing up in and around funeral homes. There could have been a lot more emotion to the story, but I think telling it as a graphic novel kind of diminished that possibility. The drawings didn’t add much depth or insight, but it would have been a sparse story without them.

I've also read Are You My Mother? by Bechdel and had a similar reaction regarding the emotion in the book. I can see how both books were therapeutic for Bechdel to write and illustrate, but I didn't get much of that from the drawings or even the story. They were both interesting, but dragged a bit with the navel-gazing, heavy literary references, and other stuff that could have been cut out to make a snappy, impactful graphic novel.

Fun Home is going to be performed as a play at Playhouse on the Square in May, so I'm excited to see how it translates to the stage. If you've read much of this blog at all, you know I love comparing books to movies and play versions of themselves, so we'll see how Fun Home turns out!